“I was scarcely seated when Giles began to rally me on the Puritanical ancestry and character of New England. I saw there was no other person from New England present, and, therefore, although conscious that I was in no degree qualified to manage a religious discussion, I felt myself bound to defend my country on this delicate point as well as I could. Whether it had been prearranged that a debate on the Christian religion, in which it should be powerfully ridiculed on the one side and weakly defended on the other, was to be brought forward as promising amusement to a rather free-thinking dinner party, I will not presume to say, but it had that appearance, and Mr. Giles pushed his raillery, to my no small annoyance, if not to my discomfiture, until dinner was announced.
“That I hoped would relieve me by giving a new turn to the conversation, but the company was hardly seated at table when he renewed the assault with increased asperity, and proceeded so far at last as to ridicule the character, conduct and doctrines of the Divine Founder of our religion; Mr. Jefferson in the meantime smiling and nodding approval on Mr. Giles, while the rest of the company silently left me and my defense to our fate, until at length my friend David Franks took up the argument on my side. Thinking this a fair opportunity for avoiding further conversation on the subject, I turned to Mr. Jefferson and said, ‘Sir, this is a strange situation in which I find myself; in a country professing Christianity and at a table with Christians, as I supposed, I find my religion and myself attacked with severe and almost irresistible wit and raillery, and not a person to aid in my defense but my friend Mr. Franks, who is himself a Jew.’”
This episode throws a curious light on the character of Thomas Jefferson’s “philosophical unbelief,” the unlovely fashion of that day; it also illustrates a certain facility in David Franks.
Relations between the Colonies and the Mother Country became strained. Political feelings ran high. The lines of division between